New Horizons - Part 1 - A Brief History of Club Penguin

Uploaded by Clubpenguin on 24.10.2012

"New Horizons"
LANE: I still remember the first time I met Lance... Definitely an out-of-the-box thinker and always had all these different crazy ideas
HOLLY: Every Friday, Lance would come in on his own time and work on his own little project. And slowly we started hearing more about it...
CHRIS: He created Experimental Penguins back in 2000.
LANE: He had these big, blobby-looking penguins walking around and talking to each other. And that was all they did, on a white screen.
LANCE: Then I had this ambitious idea to build a massive multiplayer snowball war game...
LANE: What if we take some of the same stuff you're building and just make a world with it?
LANE: If we could make a playground that would allow kids from around the world to connect, that could really be something...
DAVE: He had his plan and then Lane helped him really put substance to that plan.
LANE: And the more we brainstormed, the more the pieces of this world started to come together.
LANCE: If we worked on this full-time and we hired people and we put Dave's company behind this, how fast could we build it?
DAVE: When they pitched it, it was... I was quite astounded, actually. I thought, wow, this actually could work...
LANCE: By late 2004/early 2005, created Penguin Chat 3 as a test for Club Penguin.
LANE: Penguin Chat 3 was us trying to progress the game and progress the experience. And I'm sure we would have done Penguin Chat 4 and Penguin Chat 5, but we knew that we had to move it from being this mini-game to being its own thing.
CHRIS: Club Penguin wasn't known as Club Penguin to the kids for a while. It was the "Big Update"...
LANCE: We didn't have a name for it. We didn't know what to call it! (laughs)
CHRIS: Lots of different things were talked about. Do we do Penguin World? Do we do Penguin Land?
LANCE: We didn't want to call it Penguin Chat because it wasn't a chat anymore. It was a full world with items and places and mini-games. We wanted to call it something bigger!
LANE: What if we take this idea of a club, or a community... That's all the stuff we're trying to create here. Why don't we just call it Club Penguin?
LANCE: We asked everybody that was playing Penguin Chat 3 to come on over and test out this new Club Penguin.
LANE: We finally posted to the blog... We're excited to announce the Club Penguin Beta Test.
LANCE: A beta test is simply to have everybody play on it and see if we can find all the bugs.
LANE: So Lance came to me and said, "We need to test the servers. We need to figure out how many people we can cram onto these things."
CHRIS: So, we decided... Let's throw a party. All the creators of Club Penguin at the time would be show up...
LANE: celebrate the end of the beta process and the road towards launching the full version. And that's really where the whole party thing began for Club Penguin.
CHRIS: Beta testing was fun in that way, in that it was exploring this new continent of the internet... What are we doing? How big is this going to be...?
LANCE: When we launched Club Penguin, we never expected it to be as big as it became.
CHRIS: No one had done something like Club Penguin before. We had to really make up a lot of our own rules.
GIN: It wasn't like, "Let's go try and do X, Y, Z..." It's like, "Let's just try stuff..."
LANE: Our job is not to come up with every idea out there. Our job is to listen, to observe, to read all the emails...
LANE: To make sure we are hearing as much as possible.
DAVE: Club Penguin's value is in the community.
CHRIS: That's exactly where Club Penguin's life comes from! It's just that kind of sandbox element of, "We give you the tools, now do whatever you want with it."
GIN: The notion that it's really just about the kids will never change.
LANE: We take all of those collective ideas and all that inspiration that comes in and just... turn it into reality.
CHRIS: Whatever they come up with, we're going to do. And they're going to come up with something and we're going to respond... And then they're going to come up with something else... It's like this conversation.
LANE: Going back from the very beginning of Club Penguin, it was never about standing still. It was never about just arriving and staying there. It's always been about the journey.
LANE: And so now, we're getting to ready to unveil the next leg of the journey...
LANE: And that's something that's pretty exciting...
To be continued...